I had the unique experience to join 10 other churches in a Multi-Site Leadership Community this week.
–Christ Fellowship, Miami FL
–Flamingo Road
–McLean Bible Church, McLean VA
–Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, Menlo Park CA (John Ortberg is the pastor)
–Real Life Fellowship, Corpus Christi TX
–The Crossing, Quincy IL
–The Journey Fellowship, St. Louis MO
–The Oaks Fellowship, Red Oak TX
–Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington IL
–Woodside Bible Church, Troy MI

This was made possible by the Leadership Network. I can’t begin to tell you how impressed I was with what they were able to do in a couple of days. Here is the process they took us through as I saw it.

Step 1—Tell your story
This part helped us to know where we were all coming from

We used the game of "Life"

Step 2—Learn together
There were 8 learning teams. The three people from our church went to different teams. My team focused on collaboration. When we got in our group there were 8 people and we had four articles to read. There was only enough time to read one each. We did that and then reported our findings to the rest of our team. We then found commonalities and put together a picture/chart to share our findings with the rest of the community.

Step 3—Challenges/Opportunities
After that we split into our individual church groups. So Dan, Mark and I went to a corner and brainstormed our current challenges and opportunities.

After this was done we reported to the community. From that report we agreed on common themes in all the groups and formed teams to focus on those. I choose the “church merger” group. Dan went to “overall church structure,” and Mark went to “developing metrics.”

Mine was great. We discussed the growing trend of hurting churches partnering with well equipped, reproducible churches to have greater impact. Very interesting. It is what we just did with our Mesquite campus.

Step 4—Develop specific church plan
We will be in this leadership community for the next two years. So we (Justin, Dan, Mark) got together and set some two year goals that we would like to see happen. We then developed action items and 6 month check points. This way when we come back together in April we can be held accountable to what we are saying we want to do.

Step 5—Speak into it
We ended by displaying all the charts for everyone to see. We then were tasked individually with giving feedback/suggestion to the charts. We were handed 6 yellow sticky notes and were asked to write our idea on it and put it on the chart. I wrote things like,  “check out some books by Robert Webber,” (they were looking to add creative elements to service) and “I can email you information about our charter schools.” (they were looking for creative income streams)

I felt like I needed to get this information down so that I could process it better. I hope you find it helpful. I cannot say enough about The Leadership Network and their ability to bring great leaders together to collaborate and grow in their vision and effectiveness. I look forward to our next meeting in April.